Schools should abandon attempts to create more gender equality in the education system because the move will “completely deny human biology and nature”, according to an academic.

The drive to push more girls into traditionally male-dominated subjects such as engineering, physics and computing should be scrapped, said Dr Gijsbert Stoet, a reader in psychology at Glasgow University.

In a speech, he said the search for more gender balance – a passion of many politicians, school leaders and learned societies – was a waste of time as innate differences between boys and girls meant they would always be naturally drawn to certain academic subjects and careers.

He said the nation probably needed to “give up on the idea that we will get many female engineers or male nurses”.

The comments – made to a British Education Studies Association conference in Glasgow – appear to fly in the face of high-profile campaigns to ensure more equal numbers of boys and girls take particular subjects at GCSE, A-level and university.

But in comments quoted by the Times Educational Supplement, Dr Stoet said initiatives designed to close the gap “completely deny human biology and nature”.

He said it was “really hard” to attract girls towards subjects such as computing, adding: “Girls will say, ‘well, that’s boring, I’m just not interested in it’. We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers.

“Do we really care that only five per cent of the programmers are women? Well, actually, I don’t care who programs my computers.”

Dr Stoet said a “wealthy, democratic society can afford to let people do what they want”.

“What is better?” he said. “To have 50 per cent of female engineers who do not really like their work but say, ‘yeah, well, I did it for the feminist cause’. Or do you want three per cent of female engineers who say, ‘I really like my job’?”

Dr Stoet also rejected claims that boys or girls need gender-specific role models, citing research from a colleague that “found no evidence that girls are more inspired or inclined to learn when they are being taught by female teachers, and the same is true for boys”.

He also appeared to criticise the tendency to view girls as a struggling group in need of special attention, even though they often perform better than boys at school, the TES reported.

“Nobody seems to be that interested that boys have problems,” he said. “We have, as human beings, a naturally tendency to see women as vulnerable and needing help. But if it’s a boy who needs help, he’s responsible for himself.”

But Stuart Farmer, a trustee of the Association for Science Education, said the failure of more girls to study subjects such as physics was a big problem that was not just down to human nature.

He told the TES: “The influence of wider societal pressures and norms should not be underestimated. This starts with things as simple as pink for a girl baby and blue for a boy baby and goes on to things such as segregated toys and books in shops.”